So… this book is about how you tried to find all of your old vinyl records? The ones you sold or gave away twenty years ago?
It is, yeah.
Not just similar records, but the exact ones?
The exact ones.
You had a copy of, let’s say, the Pixie’s Doolittle, and you sold it in, I don’t know…
1996, at the Record Swap in Homewood, Illinois.
Okay. Wow. You seriously remember that?
I seriously do.
And today, a few decades later, you thought, “What the hell, let’s get it back…”
That’s right.
The exact record.
The one I sold to Record Swap.
A record store that went out of business in 1999.
Well sure. But that doesn’t mean the record’s gone. Unless it was melted down to ash in a warehouse fire, it still exists. Somebody owns it. Maybe the people who have it don’t even know about it. Maybe it’s in their basement, shoved into the bottom of a water-damaged Meijer’s wine box, or in a friend’s attic, in a stack of high school yearbooks and letters from dead relatives that nobody remembers are left up there. Maybe it’s gathering dust in some dark corner, waiting to be rediscovered.
You sound like an idiot.
I can accept that criticism.
So you’re well aware that you were on a fool’s quest?
Oh, absolutely. I knew that none of this was rational or even likely. Don Quixote had a better chance of winning the love of Dulcinea than I did of tracking down my old vinyl. But that didn’t make it any less important. And like Quixote fighting the windmills, I couldn’t tell you why the thing needed to be done; it just needed to be done.
Even if it was entirely impossible?
Well, not entirely.
Come on!
Look at something like Let It Be.
The Beatles?
No, the Replacements. I had a very specific, unique copy of Let it Be that I was trying to find.
What made it unique?
It had a scratch right in the middle of “Androgynous,” right when Westerberg is warbling that he “might be a father, but he sure ain’t a—” That’s how I first heard “Androgynous,” and I sort of got used to it. It wasn’t an annoyance, it was just an ingrained part of the melody. I’ve heard that particular scratch so many times, when I gave up the album and started listening to it on other formats, I’d still instinctively reach out, ready to nudge the needle.
That’s it? That’s all you remember about the record?
Well, it also smells like weed.
Weed? As in marijuana?
And it was pretty pungent too. As a teenager, I used to hide my stash in there, because I thought I was being clever. As if my parents never would have thought to check a Replacements record.
Well of course. The Mats weren’t about weed.
They were about booze! You get what I’m saying.
I totally do. Anybody who goes looking for weed in a Replacements album just doesn’t understand the aesthetics of the band.
It’s so obvious. Anyway, even though it was the least obvious hiding spot, the record sleeve started to get a little stinky. Maybe there was something in the cardboard that strengthened and intensified the marijuana scent. You could smell it from three houses down. If I put the album in a suitcase and tried to get it past airport security, the dog-sniffing dogs wouldn’t even bother. They’d just be like, “Are you kidding me? This is an insult to my training. You guys can’t smell this shit? Do I really need to point it out?”
But that assumes you’ll be able to find it at all.
There were 150,000 CDs manufactured, and 51,000 cassettes. But the sole vinyl pressing of Let It Be was just 26,000 units. That’s a drop in the bucket compared to most iconic records. I don’t know how many vinyl copies of Michael Jackson’s Thriller were actually made, but I remember reading in Quincy Jones’ biography that it’d sold 120 million copies.
Holy shit.
That’s why any of us gave up on vinyl, right? Because the technology changed. You don’t want to be the one who’s like, “Enjoy your jetpacks. I’ll stick with my Volvo.”
I totally understand.
Nobody could blame you for thinking that.
Over the coming months, I began selling off my records. I was like the guy who gets kissed by a hot girl and decides he has to get rid of his porn collection immediately because “I won’t be needing this any more.” I’d been that guy—several times, in fact, back when getting rid of porn meant filling a pillow case full of VHS tapes and taking them to the nearest inconspicuous dumpster—but my vinyl wasn’t as easy to cast off.
I guess not.
At first, I sold off just the unessentials. Nothing that would be missed. After the initial purge, I unloaded my albums more sporadically. Some were loaned out to friends and quickly forgotten. Some were left in my parents’ basement, or with relatives who already had too much old shit in their attics so what’s one more box. If I needed quick money for rent or weed—especially during the mid-90s, when I was just getting started in my journalism career, and my parents weren’t always enthusiastic about bankrolling their son’s unwillingness to find dependable employment—I could dip into my record stash for a dependable payday.
The last time I counted, somewhere around 1987, I had in the ballpark of two thousand. The first purge of 300 barely left a dent. And from there, it was just a few records here, a few dozen there, as I needed them. I never made the conscious decision to deep-six my vinyl. It was always just, “Shit, I need beer money for the weekend. Oh wait, I still have that copy of the Stooges’ Raw Power!” It was like a low interest bearing savings account with guilt free withdrawals. I was never going to get rich on a bunch of old Elvis Costello records held together with scotch tape, or a Purple Rain that was so warped it sounded like the doves were crying because Prince was having a stroke. These weren’t investments, they were just antiques from my past that had small yet immediate monetary value.
Do you remember the last one?
That’s it. I sold it in 1999, the year I got married and my dad died. I was still embarrassingly poor, and needed money fast. During a visit to my parents, I found it in my old bedroom closet, the last of a once mighty collection, the one record I always managed to talk myself put of selling. But at this point, it seemed silly to hold onto it. I already had the CD, which was vastly superior (or so I thought at the time). The ragged and well-worn vinyl had long outlasted its usefulness, even as its secondary purpose, as a brilliant hiding spot for my weed.
Where’d you sell it?
Exactly. Except I was too freaked out to appreciate that. I was more worried that they’d buy a record that smelled so pungently of marijuana. As it turned out, that wasn’t a problem. The kid behind the counter, who must have been at least ten years my junior, with thick sideburns and a Sonic Youth tattoo on his forearm, offered me $10 for it. Which was kinda amazing, since I only paid $4 for it in 1985. Reselling old records, especially records that could be used as evidence in drug convictions, rarely reap 60% profits.
Did he just not notice?
I was 22 and fresh out of college when the original album came out, so the anniversary was kind of a big deal for me. Not because I especially liked Ten, but because being reminded that it was released half my life ago served as a grim reminder that I’m going to die someday, probably sooner than I’d prefer. It was like a pop culture abacus. Every time a beloved album or TV show or movie hits a milestone anniversary, we slide another bead across the wire, marking the passage of time between when we were young and how much closer we are to the end.
Come on!
What the fuck?
I tracked down a Panasonic boombox for the disconcertingly affordable price of $20. (This was legitimately upsetting. A boombox used to be something you had to save for. Have boomboxes become the inner-city hookers of music, ready to give a handjob to anybody with a double sawbuck?) Finding a copy of Ten on CD was just a matter of searching eBay and deciding whether I wanted the $9.99 used version or the $1.99 “ultra-used” version, whose previous owner had evidently used the disc as either a cocktail coaster or doorstop (and possibly both). I opted for the latter, for reasons that probably wouldn’t make sense to those of you who don’t remember life before iPods. There was a time, long before MP3s, when you could judge how much a piece of music was loved by how badly the jewel case was chipped.
You can’t just close your eyes and transport yourself back to 1991?
So what’d you do?
I tried calling Susan during that summer of Ten sentimentality, just to see if hearing her voice again would be enough to bring me back to that place, to make my stomach clench and my throat dry up and my hands grow restless for a cigarette to take the edge off. I wanted her to say something unintentionally cruel, something that could emotionally devastate a 22-year-old guy in a way that only Eddie Vedder’s wounded baritone could heal.
Did it work?
It’s all in the book. But this wasn’t about her. The phone number was incidental.
What was it about then?